Nothing like an unexpected injury to give us time to just read and reflect.In our category of another lost invite, there was the recent OECD “People, Planet, Prosperity” summit in Paris. Instead of a boat ride on the Seine and sumptuous food we will have to settle for the powerpoint online. I was struck by the statement of Tatiana Glad where she encouraged the attendees to “Look at government as a crowdfunded initiative for the good of the people. The question is what are the mechanisms we use. Are we using peer to peer mechanisms to figure out the answers to the sharing economy or are we using traditional mindsets and stifling it.”
Actually I have and will continue to assert that the OECD, like the UN entities, is using preschool, K-12, and higher ed globally as a means to stifle traditional minds altogether. The guiding focus appears to be what activities and classroom emphases can lock in the desired values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in the student’s brain and central nervous system. Building on what the White House is touting as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies, the OECD is pushing and wants to assess “Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills.” I am sure it is purely coincidental that the ESEA Rewrites mandate that very emphasis. So do charter schools under the contractual language that gets them approved now and renewed.
The OECD is a participant on the Advisory Board of an entity called Global Education Futures that has been holding alarming meetings this year in preparation for issuing a report on global directions in education at Davos next January. I suspect that will be another lost invite. We will cover GEF in a different post. I want to focus here on the active deceit going on around school choice and local control and how it directly connects to this global agenda. Also on the GEF Advisory Board is Tom Vander Ark, an education consultant who was previously with the Gates Foundation. On July 31, 2015 he wrote a story “10 Next Steps for EdLeaders: The Advanced Course” touting Fulton County in metro Atlanta as “inventing the future of learning.” Now I live in that cutting-edge district and that is not what parents are being told. They certainly are not being told that in twenty years all their precious children will be left with is highly manipulated neural structures and personalities and what GEF calls ‘existential competencies’.
Yet Fulton is a charter system the Heritage Foundation-affiliated state public policy ‘think tank’ touted as an example of ‘school choice’ ( I was there) even though the language of the charter spells out non-consensual psychological rape of the kind described in my book Credentialed to Destroy as Transformational Outcomes Based Education. I nicknamed it Tranzi OBE to keep the references shorter. It is all over Texas too as this 2010 report lays out. http://www.bobpearlman.org/Articles/Coppell_Shannon_Buerk.pdf We can also connect it to GEF via the March 2015 P21 Summit “Patterns of Innovation: 21st Century Learning in Action” because GEF touts P21 as a global exemplar and because Kelly Young of the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution Re-Imagining Education Project spoke at both the P21 Summit and the 2015 TASA Midwinter Conference.
She spoke in Texas with Michael Hinojosa who was also part of that Project along with the NEA, AFT, Heritage Foundation (except Stuart Butler skipped over to Brookings in mid-Project), and others while he was the Cobb County Super (next to Fulton) and while he was training local Texas Supers or aspiring to be a Super admins. He is now the Interim Dallas Super again and thus brings the GEF vision there when we trace these things all the way through. It is also Hinojosa whose picture is up on the website of the Large County-Wide and Suburban District Consortium–Success At Scale–lobbying Lamar Alexander and Johnny Isakson and others over the ESEA Rewrite and letting local districts take the lead. That meeting on February 4, 2014 was the day after the White House meeting on Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies covered in the last post. Coincidental? Awfully convenient given all these intersecting agendas.
The “Our Values and Priorities” link at that website, which again is intended to get at and change the orientation of the schools that are actually still working and retaining an academic emphasis, is full of references to the need for schools now to be driven by student learning goals set by “internationally benchmarked standards and expectations.” We are back to the OECD again then and the various UN pushes like UNESCO, IB, and the Learning Metrics Task Force that fit with the language in Lamar Alexander’s Every Child Achieves Act. This is again how the Local Becomes the Global, while GEF admits it is really Delocalization because so much education now is digital and embedded in virtual reality. The software writer is the real source of control over what will be targeted in the student’s mind.
In Chapter 4 of my book that covers Competency and Tranzi OBE I explained how these international assessments are tied to something called DeSeCo–Definition and Selection of Competences. The Consortium then is obliquely but surely binding all their member districts to the change the child through the schools vision. Those physiological changes require the kind of assessments described in the last post. They get at the internalized “reasons and motives, which are the equivalent in the world of mind of causal connections in the physical world.” Now where did that quote come from? That quote came from a 1979 biography of a 19th century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies whose work greatly influenced John Dewey, many Karl Marx admirers, sociology and psychology globally, and the cybernetic vision for the mind.
It is Dilthey’s vision of creating an interdisciplinary Human Studies that is guiding so much of the actual Common Core implementation and the shift to Competency globally. It’s the why of the shift because Competency and Proficiency focus on student’s aims and interests. Students are encouraged to set goals and plan how to fulfill those goals. Student-centered Competency Learning really places the student on the menu and subject to examination and experimentation as data gets collected that gets at “real flesh and blood human beings who are in touch with reality through their sensations, feelings, thoughts, and acts of will.” That education data, even when not personally identifiable, is hugely useful and telling, and is part of a $31 million NSF ‘data-driven science’ initiative announced October 1, 2014.
All that education data gets at the internalized ‘sphere of mental processes’ so it can be known and then altered at will. The teacher need never actually know as the data flows from online assessments into district and state coffers and NSF cyberinfrastructure databases. Competency, which all these listed programs are driving at, assesses the “intellectual and creative capacity for abstract thinking, conceptualizing and logical reasoning which distinguishes man from other creatures” for each student and then begins to manipulate and change the activities to instill as few connections as is possible to carry out essential knowledge and skills.” The cyberneticians know the Axemaker Mind is an uncontrollable mind and hard to predict. That is unacceptable so we get Competency instead.
When I pulled the 2012 paper from one of the cited NSF education researchers I could recognize the intentional neural restructuring and how Core Disciplinary Ideas, Cross-Cutting Themes, Enduring Understandings, and the focus on no single correct answer wicked problems would all come into play. His paper though started off with how useful this would be to better teach reading and math and finally stop the “education wars.” He needs to read Chapters 2 and 3 of my book and recognize no one actually wants proper teaching because of the inherent ignition of the Axemaker Mind that comes from fluent phonetic reading. My point is that we are turning our students into guinea pigs in a gigantic global sociology project being administered at the local level of the school. Yet virtually everyone involved only knows a part of the story or is also being lied to.
Can you imagine if Competency and the Common Core were being pitched for what they really are–a social experiment examining what it means to be human? Administrators and politicians openly admitting a desire for neural changes at a physical level locked in for life and touted as Habits of Mind? We would have a riot at every school, including many of the privates and charters. So we get deceit, euphemisms, and redefinitions of common words and phrases no one alerts us to.
Except me. Throughout history governments have focused their desire for maintaining power and control over the transmitters of troubling knowledge–book publishers, radio, TV, textbooks, educators. Censorship and propaganda are their favorite tools. They are also highly visible tools that just reek of coercion. Invisibly instilling Habits of Mind at a neural level is subtle and effective. Making the student the focus of a Human Studies program and the Moral Sciences just like Dilthey envisioned is the best way to describe the nature of the data now mandated for collection in the various state preschool programs like Colorado GOLD.
Governments at all levels globally have moved beyond censorship and propaganda and decided, at meetings we are not invited to, to make the receiver of information their new focus. That would be the receiver better known as the student’s brain and personality.
Don’t we all wish this was science fiction written by Orwell instead of me documenting the connections and declared aspirations across the decades and continents?
We are getting the hype about Local Control and School Choice to obscure that the reality is the exact opposite.
Your reference to wicked problems made me realize it would be a useful term to incorporate into my monthly three minute comment to the State Ed Board which I am just finishing up. A bit of surfing brought up this commentary http://annpmcmahon.com/2011/03/16/education-reform-a-wicked-problem/. There is nothing new in this piece, but it is useful because it is a compact and relatively transparent exposition of what’s afoot. My favorite pull quote: “It turns out that we’re wired for connection with each other, and that our relationships define us more than our separateness does. Neuroscience also helps us understand how our brains function to limit our grasp of and responses to wicked problems. Dietrich Dörner gives many examples of how capable, intelligent and thoughtful people fail to understand complex systems and make wise and prudent decisions about interventions in them. Psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about how our brains respond with feeling and action to situations that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous – and not to situations that aren’t. This was an adaptive trait that kept us alive long ago, but it short-circuits an appropriate and collective sense of urgency in the face of wicked problems like global warming and education reform, whose consequences play out day by day over decades.” A lot is packed into a short passage — human connectedness, failure to understand systems, the goal of harnessing feeling and action collectively to solve urgent social problems [of their choosing]. It is almost disarmingly candid.
The answer to this conundrum, this wicked problem? Click the link and find out!
Disarmingly candid describes so much of this at the level of the onion we have peeled down to. Thanks so much for bringing this up. It is so odd to go back in time and read a description of what it would take to get a different personality, mind, and form of culture and realize every single specified point is part of the required competency/Tranzi obe orientation.
As tends to happen when I write these posts we have turned up the most alarming advisory board beyond the acknowledged ones I mentioned here. One member cited was Ethan Gray, whose CEE Trust and Mindtrust Institute is cited. We discusses the Donnell Kay Foundation last week and its role and it is a part of CEE Trust. http://education-cities.org/our-members/
Again this is an awful lot of coordination at a national or global level where the prescribed administration is local. New Schools Venture Fund also turns out to be involved with the Re-Imagining Education Project of Convergence. http://www.newschools.org/blog/newschools-catapult-1-week-countdown-early-observations is from them a few days ago and notice the non-cognitive, expanded view of student success, needed to gain funding.
Lots of NSV involvement at fed ED and an NSV summit was where I listened by video to David Coleman bragging about the College Board being backed by all the resources of ETS, which also sponsored the Gordon Commission. ETS also went looking for someone to push higher order thinking in the 80s, leading to STELLA and Tucson.
Need to make sure that list is vetted more and saved elsewhere beyond me before I put up a link. Descriptions are becoming more our friend now as it uncovers other sources on other servers.
“Psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about how our brains respond with feeling and action to situations that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous – and not to situations that aren’t. This was an adaptive trait that kept us alive long ago, but it short-circuits an appropriate and collective sense of urgency in the face of wicked problems like global warming and education reform, whose consequences play out day by day over decades. ”
Translation: Problems whose consequences play out day by day over decades have previously been dealt with using rational, empirical, and reality based thinking. We must change education so that children’s brains respond with feeling and action to such problems instead of rational thought.For example; we must respond to questions about changing climate with urgency and emotion rather than scientific methods. In particular, we must respond to shortcomings in education in an urgent and emotional way. Then we must respond to problems caused by this approach with further urgent and emotional methods. Rational thinking has no place.
The intent is to use data to solve systemic problems and meet human needs as this FuturICT post made clear. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/science-fiction-made-real-were-we-ever-to-know-in-time/
I found that tracking Sandy Pentland head of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT’s Media Lab after reading his Social Physics book. MIT is a partner in GFFF so reading this Sloan paper this morning on analytics http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/conclusionpaper1/improving-state-of-affairs-with-analytics-107430.pdf that had this italicized Pentland comment featured on the first page:
This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we’ve already had… We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain dcale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities.”
Now obviously hubris is no longer a concept emphasized at MIT if it ever was, but Pentland is using the term ‘human physics’ in the same way Dilthey does the the term Human Studies. Another translaton of the German word is the ‘moral sciences’ which would fit in with the ‘character’ emphasis of Charles Fadel’s Center for Curriculum Design that MIT, Harvard, Stanford, OECD, UNESCO, the State of Massachusetts and others are all involved in.
Now the company whose website that is located on does not just advise businesses. They have also created a curriculum for the Common Core as part of North Carolina’s Race to the Top grant. Here it is https://www.sascurriculumpathways.com/portal/
Now how much easier is learning analytics if you know precisely what concepts and activities each student has been exposed to? Is the real purpose of learning standards like the Common Core becoming clearer?
SAS is pushing interoperability and P-20 longitudinal data systems along with IMS, SIF, PESC & CEDS. To leverage this bold technology they need data and lots of it. No better place to mine this than pre-K to college education. As Robin makes clear they don’t need personally identifiable information to shift the mindsets of future generations…but interoperability standards coupled with personalized learning will inevitably blur the line between one’s private and public existence.
SAS contributed to this paper https://www.siia.net/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=zuf9QNK3BZ4%3D&portalid=0, which explains and argues for the urgent transition to open source education and interoperability standards.
By the way, the quote you cited above about how technology allows us “to see enough ourselves to build social systems that work…” is insane! To view human experience through the lens of weak neuroscience and faulty data is a perverse simulacrum of reality–much like looking into a funhouse mirror. There’s no way this ends well.
Which is why I was so determined to write my book. These are stories and declarations that must be told and widely disseminated to be stopped.
Make sure you take a link at this new Democracy Collaborative report. http://democracycollaborative.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/EducateAndEmpower.pdf
Inclusive economic institutions. The graphics alone are darn alarming even before we get to the statements in the text.
And it will be endless. They need unelected boards in every sector of gubt to accept data and enforce from above and below without question. To force data on low ifo electeds and give them swag to keep in line. Elected people can be troublesome to systems control. Ergo ESEA and property rights to destroy local electedoffials having already established the many local councils already set up in every town & county. Using data and communitarian friend/fascist tactics to acheive agenda.
The following information comes from Anita Hoge who has done outstanding sleuthing re ECAA and HR5. When we put together what Anita shows in this article with what Robin has researched and demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, here on her blog and in her book, regarding the cybernetic agenda of rewiring the student’s brain invisibly at the neurobiological level for appropriate collectivist attitudes, values and behaviors we can see that its all worse than we imagined.
On top of screening every child for mental health issues as Anita correctly points out the Interventions/Positive Behavior mandates in ECAA/HR5 etc… exist just as much to legally justify the software/behavior changing at a neurological level, computer based curriculum and its big data reveals, as much as any visit to the school psychologist.
This is worser than anyone’s worse nightmare.
Dear Pennsylvanian’s,
The current exposure of President Obama’s race data base/ZIP code redistribution, SSI identification of “mental defects” and my exposure of the mental health agenda in ESEA linked to schools/ObamaCare/MEDICAID proves this agenda is moving forward aggressively.
Our Moratorium to Governor Corbett (http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita111.htm )
to STOP the data was very much on target last year. Truly, the EQA/NAEP NEVER DIED. The attitudes, values, beliefs, and dispositions of your children and grandchildren are being collected into this database. Entire psychometric dossiers are created to identify FAMILIES. But this collection is not the only problem. Your children are being challenged with interventions everyday to change to these collectivist goals. Our country is in danger. We must stop the data.
Obama was very clear about what he thought about Pennsylvania citizens in his campaign rolling through Johnstown, Levittown, Upper Turkeyfoot, Allentown, Lancaster, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh…Did he notice the great sense of shared community, of humor, of history, and of abiding faith? Our children are a target.
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Pennsylvania is the cradle of freedom and Pennsylvanian’s have great national pride. Pennsylvanians have a strong sense of their place in American history. It’s called the Constitution. Have we been called as leaders now? This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. We must save our nation divided by someone pitting one side against the other. We are not standing together. We have been manipulated to think we are a country divided to be easily taken down. We have news for President Obama…but we have work to do.
Will Pennsylvania citizens continue to cling to religion and guns?
First Amendment principles are our first defense…when this goes…so does everything else.
This country is in trouble. The documentation I am forwarding means:
WE MUST STOP THIS AGENDA. WE MUST STOP ESEA, FIRST.
Forgive me for striking fear into your heart, but the time is late, my friends.
Please read and share the following documentation linking this agenda together:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6zikOSdV-TAck1vMHAxYnhsTEE
Anita
Read the Pentland quote I just provided in reply to eclectic above. Filter those intentions through what analytics does.
Now add in this Idiograph created for state and local governments https://www.govloop.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/How-The-Internet-of-Things-Works-Infographic.pdf and what it tells us about how data will be used.
Think of the mission of the governmental agency and what needs to be known to better accomplish that mission.
Add in the December 2013 declaration by both the US and UK governments that satisfying ‘subjective wellbeing’ of each person was the new purpose of governments. The Re-engineering mandate knows no bounds and there is no sense from profs involved in all this like Pentland or consultants like VanderArk that this can all destroy everything that has ever worked. That is precisely why I laid out in the book the elements that have always mattered to genuine mass prosperity.
This is a world that now denies any boundaries to political power. Much of the grasping is also hiding in entities that claim they are devoted to public policy in the name of ‘conservative thought’ and ‘free markets’. At the programs I have attended what is actually advocated for is the precise opposite. Much like that http://blogs.cisco.com/gov/aspen_summit_progress_and_freedom_foundation_pff entity I talked about on the previous thread in the comments.
That is the same Cisco that is pushing ATC21S. Microsoft is also a founder. The free market language, like school choice and local control in this post, are merely rhetoric to mask the Marxian determination to guide society and control the economy based on information.
Data. Data. Data.= the ultimate Human Studies playground. No wonder the admins keep telling parents all over the country they cannot see the data being collected on their children in the name of personalized learning.
Just to add another layer of insanity , someone named Lawrence Lessig ( not Lessing) has decided to possibly throw his hat into the Democratic ring in the Presidential race. He has earned some notoriety for his work in defending the freedom of the Internet. He needs to be looked at closely because of a lot of other connections related to our concerns–not to mention Harvard, Yale, etc.
I played a hunch there would be a tie to the Aspen Institute. Bingo. http://today.law.harvard.edu/lessig-and-zittrain-share-big-ideas-at-aspen-festival-video/
This has him as a confirmed speaker back when he was at Stanford Law and heading their Center for Internet and Society. http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/upload/Speakers_List_session1_061509.pdf
Notice that Csik, creator of the concept of Excellence in education and a co-founder of GERG–General Evolution research Group–with Ervin Laszlo is also listed as a speaker. So is John Holdren and the League of Innovative Schools reports to his office in the WH. Also Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High, which would have been a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks at the time of this list.
One more riddle me this–why does the Stanford Center for Internet and Society have the 2015 Parliament of World Religions conference in Salt Lake scheduled for October on its calendar if all this is not really about how to force a cultural evolution of society by changing prevailing values? http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people
Religion is not usually a big topic of discussion here. I do find it an interesting direction to move to. Charlotte has been discussing it on ABC blog also in the form of Catholicism.
As far as shifting values, this appears to be slanted in one direction.
http://www.parliamentofreligions.org//content/parliament-2009
What precisely do you think they want the world to value that they do not currently, so much so they are willing to bend minds for. Climate change?
This is the ISC post about the original Parliament in 1993 with a link to the vision. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/persuading-americans-in-sufficient-numbers-to-see-economic-and-social-rights-as-an-entitlement-of-being-alive/
Religion is a competing belief system and world-view creator and it cannot be permitted to be pushing competing world-views. Dilthey is actually the philosopher/ social scientist who came up with the phrase worldview in its German form of Weltanschaung and he wrote about why it was important to frame how members of a collectivist society perceive the world and frame reality and interpret their experiences.
Climate change is an excuse, edducation is the change method, and as Daniel Bell put it in 1976 a state-directed economy and state-managed society would be the direction of the remainder of the 20th. Since that reality would not be appealing to most Americans except the ones who wished to benefit by category as a group instead of traits as an individual, it would need to be camouflaged. I think the camouflaging has been the role of these so-called ‘conservative,’ market-oriented think tanks. It’s why they seem to hate facts so when they interfere with the talking points. It wasn;t just Heritage involved with the Convergence ed Project. Did you notice Rick Hess of AEI as well? Or Michael Horn who speaks regularly to state groups. Dan Siegel’s involvement is scary when we focus on what he writes. His Mindsight book is on the way, but that feeds straight into New Age religious practices and the Eastern religions. None of those reverence the individual vs the collective.
Thought you might appreciate this article given your knowledge on charter contracts.
http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2012/chartering-the-future.html
Did you recognize Andy Smarick was listed as on the Advisory Panel of the Convergence Project?
Moreover, ever since I read that Heritage Hyped Jindal touted as Chair America Next report I have looked at the links of these market think tanks and that Reinventing Government book. He cites it, Cha-ching.
Also Stephen Goldsmith that he mentions is at the Kennedy School for Government now as a prof. That admitted Fabian vision per Anthony Giddens’ Global Third Way book.
Woohoo. The troubling language I first saw in Fulton’s charter and recognized as Tranzi OBE really makes sense. Heritage’s Foundry blog’s refusal to let me post a comment warning people to read the language of the charter and not assume it was pro-academic knowledge does too. Their is a discrepancy between the declared agenda and the real one. It is a time-honored tactic in politics, but we do get to trace it through reports and listening at programs.
Maybe we could look to Europe for an indication of where this is going in terms of religion. Did you see this recently? https://veneremurcernui.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/swiss-sodo-activists-sue-bishop-for-quoting-scripture/ This bishop could be facing jail time for basically reading Leviticus. You could throw that in with this one from last year for quoting Churchill: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614834/Arrested-quoting-Winston-Churchill-European-election-candidate-accused-religious-racial-harassment-repeats-wartime-prime-ministers-words-Islam-campaign-speech.html
It appears they want us to be very aware of the likes and dislikes of certain subpopulations, very quiet about other groups, and at least somewhat ignorant of history.
Mike-I believe you have an interest in the Climate Change deceit. Take a look at this new report from Lancet and the Rockefeller Foundation on how to achieve planetary health. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960901-1/fulltext
Fits right in the Competency definition of learning being pushed by the Brookings’ Learning Metrics Task Force. Makes sense since Brookings works so closely with the Rockefeller Foundation on Metropolitanism, regional equity initiatives, and now state and local manufacturing and other coordinated economic development initiatives. Truly it is all coming together and it fits perfectly.
This really gets interesting. Here is a 1995 Chicago Law review article by him called “The Construction of Social Meaning.” http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11682&context=journal_articles
He is writing about how to get people to believe things that are not true and how the law can be used to do just that.
As all my writing attests to, so can K-12 education.
Robin, you always find the scariest articles. Your link talks about not only law, but how to make subtle changes in more devious ways. With control of popular culture through movies and entertainment (Jon Stewart met how many times with Obama?), the meaning of words through our educated Elite, and ultimately our children’s minds through “education”, the government accomplishes the non-obvious coercion with repetitions needed to enact societal change. They can start to retell and remake history (Jackson or the Civil War, anyone?) and eventually, nobody respects the founding fathers (slave owners, old angry white men), anything they did, or this country. And it’s clearly happening.
It’s using the law to lock in the desired distributive justice and to make property nominally private, but also an ongoing burden because of the constant taxation.
This is someone who wants to run for President, who speaks at Aspen confabs we are not invited to, and who clearly moves back and forth among the faculties of elite graduate schools. When I locate an article that shows he knows precisely what I can prove is going on, it means this mindshift is readily acknowledged in meetings we are not invited to and classes we are unlikely to attend. I had an offline discussion with one of the regular commenters here and we agree that the kids who do get into these famous colleges and grad programs are easy to sway in the classroom. Having been told they are part of the elite by gaining admission, they want to prove they belong by taking on the mantle of the desired worldviews. False beliefs still govern behavior and they do it in predictable ways.
One thing that gets forgotten is that Bela Banathy, who was a Pres of ISSS and part of the founders of GERG in the mid-80s with Laszlo, Csik, and Riane Eisler (Caring Economics)–all these people have blog tags was under Bill Spady at the Far West Ed Lab. I can tie Tranzi OBE then to desired personal transformations away from the rational mind and achieving conscious cultural evolution via that route. So Csik is not just invited to that Aspen Summit, so are the pushers of the Maker Movement that I am saying via that Texas link and now the Pittsburgh one functions as Tranzi OBE.
Csik’s sequel to his Flow book, written in 1993, was called The Evolving Self and is all about conscious evolution via Mindfulness practices to gain a communitarian ethos. The Positive School Climate practices and the definition of Career Ready track back to communitarian practices too and also Amitai Etzioni. The early cyberneticists too in the early 60s were also citing Etzioni if you read footnotes like I do.
Another member of the Convergence Advisory Board on this Ed Project was Dr Dan Siegel. His MindShift book is also in my possession. Its subtitle is The New Science of Personal Transformation.
I am not trying to scare so much as alert. I can tell the full story in my next book, but where this is going is clear now. Virtually all of it is grounded on the foundation my first book laid out. Anyone who has not read that will not be ready for what is coming this school year. What I describe on this blog will not quite make sense. I do not want to be Cassandra watching the Trojans bring that wooden horse through the gates designed to protect them from intruders. These ed practices, Common Core and Competency, and digital learning as envisioned are designed to turn Preschool through high school into the invisible function that the Trojan Horse served. Except there will be no fires or sexual rapes to alert us, just Mind Arson and psychological rape. Then the data about the rearranged mind and what it is likely to do in the future belongs to the tech companies as Open Data as long as it has ceased to be personally identifiable. I clicked all over that Center for Privacy Forum.
Here is Dr. Siegel talking about the way culture impacts the brain and by studying that process and using brain scans they can change behaviors. Statement is made near the 4 minute mark.
While I watch that here is http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2015/08/13-new-orleans/bmpp_neworleans_august10_final.pdf what the blending of economic development, workforce development, K-12 education, sector strategies, and making the needs to low income and people of color the entire focus of political policy in the 21st century.
Only works while the feds keep printing money or borrowing from Chinese. That spigot seems increasingly troubled.
And this from the Center for American Progress explicitly confirms what I had already picked up and warned about. CCSS is ‘conceptual math, not algorithmic traditional arithmetic and algebra. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/12095408/Marchitello-CCSSmath-reportFINAL.pdf
And Brookings climbs aboard the School Choice bandwagon, completing the synthesis that this in fact fits with both the OECD and UNESCO’s global vision of how to achieve lasting change. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2015/08/12-school-choice-lessons-jochim
No more neighborhood schools means where you live matters less. Let’s cybernetic orgnaizational theory kick in to push change at the level of the student’s minds ans school. Parents are more likely to submit because they falsely believe there IS a choice. ALL schools, public or private, become carriers to propagate the desired ‘public philosophy” needed to fit with state-directed economies and state-managed societies. I have been reading Daniel Bell again and I can see how what he wanted and needed requires something like OBE and Competency to lock in the requisite shift in beliefs and values. No wonder Goodwin Liu in 2005 wrote that Yale Law Journal article that to achieve the desired vision of Equality in US society would require national education standards.
Now we also know that Liu was involved in the Constitution in 2020 push. I went to a luncheon Monday and heard the polyphonic progressive federalism law prof, now Dean at Emory, talk about the most recent SCOTUS term. He never mentioned the disparate impact housing case so I asked about it. He seemed taken aback when I asked about its applicability to education. He said the federal courts really dislike disparate impact cases. The problem is that with both the Justice Department and fed Ed pushing di in education aggressively as a civil rights violation, who will object and bring in the courts in the first place? Not a school super and taxpayer groups and parents will be unaware. PTA nationally is fully on board with the non-statutory reading and Myra Pollock for SPLC mentioned they would be training teachers and administrators the way they wish law had been drafted.
All buying time while the needed public philosophy gets put into place physiologically in enough students’ minds over time.
I made this three-minute statement before the State Board of Education this week. Three board members asked me for copies, and one emailed to express her appreciation and intention to pursue the matters I raised:
“21st century skills,” the hallmark of “postsecondary and career readiness,” have nothing to do with academics and everything to do with psychological manipulation, politely referred to as “social and emotional learning.” These skills are marketed to an unsuspecting public as the so-called “soft skills” that merely enhance the acquisition of actual knowledge.
Pearson, Colorado’s chosen assessment vendor, released a study called “Assessing 21st Century Skills: Integrating Research Findings.” This study states that “critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, metacognition, and motivation” are themselves the “educational outcomes” being sought; content knowledge is utterly beside the point.
There have been reports that Pearson Common Core-aligned assessments contain questions that have no correct answers, multiple correct answers or questions that are impossible to understand. Although these tend to be identified by critics as evidence of poor design, Pearson’s research paper suggests otherwise. The authors of the paper “recommend designing open-ended and/or ill-structured tasks” and “making student thinking and reasoning visible.” In other words, placing students in mentally incoherent situations and observing how they deal with it. They cite a study showing that “tasks relying on stimulus materials designed to evoke cognitive conflict (i.e., that reflected uncertainty, ambiguity, disorganization, and contradiction) better elicited critical thinking skills than tasks that used stimulus materials that were orderly, well-organized, and coherent.” The critical thinking skills so elicited are also called higher order thinking skills or deep thinking. Lauren Resnick, a major developer of the concept of higher order thinking, characterized it as thinking involving multiple solutions, uncertainty, and the imposition of meaning.
I wonder if parents realize that the new definition of education is seeing if their children can find their way out of a maze with no exit. Out of John Dewey’s “indeterminate situation.”
I would like to conclude with this graphic statement from a study issued by The Gordon Commission, a creation of ETS, one of whose commissioners is the vice-president of the Pearson Center for Digital Transformation. It states, “Practices of assessment do not so much reflect the nature of the individual as they construct the individual in their terms.”
No hedging as to intent. No need to resort to conspiracy theories. The statement is clear. Our students are viewed as lab rats to observe and to transform by the company Colorado contracted to assess them. This is academic child abuse, and those who continue to countenance it once the facts are known will have much to answer for.
I had decided to try to address the board every month with a statement that would get their attention and provide some illumination. This one obviously did, so it fulfilled its objective. I invite any reader whose state uses Pearson assessments to make use of it, in whole or in part, without attribution, in any venue where you see the possibility of its advancing the cause. (Don’t forget to change “Colorado” for the name of your state.)
Thanks Deborah. Pearson’s aims fit with any assessments going after higher Order Thinking Skills and Understandings. Today’s post will further illustrate why this also works with AIR, McGraw Hill, and so-called locally developed assessments of SLOs-Student Learning Outcomes. Many of those are coming from Nashua, New Hampshire and are more locally chosen to get desired changes in a student, than locally developed.